The Pentagon has concluded that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force.

The Pentagon’s first formal cyber strategy, unclassified portions of which are expected to become public next month, represents an early attempt to grapple with a changing world in which a hacker could pose as significant a threat to U.S. nuclear reactors, subways or pipelines as a hostile country’s military.

In part, the Pentagon intends its plan as a warning to potential adversaries of the consequences of attacking the U.S. in this way. “If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks,” said a military official.

So, with all the thousands of state sponsored cyberattacks unfolding 24/7/365, who are we going to attack first, China, Russia? There’s plenty of the usual suspects probing the United States’ cyberdefenses constantly, it’s hard to choose just one culprit. And what if we get the source of a cyberattack wrong? The exact origin of most of these exploits is extremely difficult to pin down. What if we mistakenly launch a missile strike on China for hacking damage that was actually caused by the Russian Mafia, how cool would that be? Probably not very cool at all.

/and, of course, when we announce a brinkmanship policy like this, and then immediately fail to back up our words with deeds, it become much more than just a joke, it manifests a profound, telltale show of national weakness

Last week, the major indices ended narrowly mixed. The NYSE composite gained 0.3%, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq both lost 0.2%, and the Dow was down 0.6%. The IBD outlook remains at “market in correction”. It’s time for a weak May to go away. Hopefully June will bring better market action.

With the market in correction, none of the watch list stocks can be considered as buy candidates.

For people claiming to be “besieged”, Hamas, through their sophisticated smuggling tunnels into Egypt, never seemed to run out of rockets to fire into Israel. And why is it that Israel is the only one who ever get blamed for “oppressing” the Gazan people? You’ll notice that this is an Egyptian border crossing that’s being opened after four years. Apparently, the Egyptians consider Hamas to be a serious security threat too.

Gaza: A mixture of excitement and anxiety gripped travelers waiting to cross the Rafah crossing on Saturday.

Egypt ruled to permanently open the crossing starting on Saturday. In the first hour after the crossing was opened, 200 Gazans entered Egypt, officials said.

“We as Palestinians are truly thankful to the Egyptian government for opening the Rafah gate,” Dr. Ghazi Hamad, the Rafah border manager and spokesman, told Gulf News.

Under the new Egyptian regime, all coordination for travel goes through the Egyptian embassy.

“I am leaving to meet my relatives in Egypt, something that was very hard to do before,” Samah Ahmad, 26, told Gulf News. Mohammad Abd Al Aal said he was taking his wife and kids on a much needed vacation. “I never took a vacation before. The only times I have ever left Gaza was for medical reasons. I had to pay a lot of money to the Egyptian police and it was very humiliating,” he said.

Women would be able to leave Gaza without restrictions, while men between the ages of 18 and 40 would have to obtain visas for Egypt at the border.

Alrighty then. I had to add a new user, but the Active Trader Pro platform is finally up on the new laptop after two days. It looks like I’m still going to need to do some phone mojo during business hours to get the options trading platform running.

And boy oh boy, ultra fast and nifty new computer saddled with Windows 7, treats me like a two year old and fights me tooth and nail against everything I try and do. It really sucks.

/and now on to trying to install legacy software that I already know W7 is going to reject

The laptop itself is awesome! Wrangling the software into submission is another awful matter entirely, Windows 7 64 bit does not play very nice with my familiar, well broken in, just the way I like it, optimized XP world.

/this is going to be a long, hard slog, loud, intense, and sustained swearing is expected to ensue, hopefully I’ll be able to physically restrain myself from striking or otherwise damaging expensive computer hardware